Gig played on 17/09/05

Mudhoney have rolled into town to join the "Don't Look Back" party. That's the title of a series of gigs in which bands perform the best-known album of their career in its entirety. It's a cheekily chosen umbrella term acknowledging music's compulsive urge to do exactly what it warns against - and to cannibalise the history thus discovered - while also providing a cast-iron guarantee that the assembled faithful will not be forced to endure the demonstration of any artist's "new direction". In which case "Don't Look Forward, Either," might be an appropriate parenthetical caveat.

The Seattle quartet released their classic, grunge-defining EP "Superfuzz Bigmuff" in 1988, a year before Nirvana's debut, "Bleach" and it's hard to forget the fork in fate's road that led Mark Arm to be here tonight and Kurt Cobain first to become a reluctant superstar, then take his own life. Unsurprisingly, there are a few black, Sub Pop T-shirts stretched over expanding beer guts in the (mostly male) crowd, but the air is most decidedly celebratory, rather than contemplative.

Sensibly, Arm and his gang have opted to play the 1992 reissue of "Superfuzz Bigmuff", which added on six of their early singles - otherwise, this would have been a very short gig indeed. After a bellowed introduction from Everett True, the journalist credited (not least of all by himself) with having first planted the seed of American grunge in the UK, a lean, impressively youthful-looking Mark Arm and co stride on, lunging straight into the peerless eruption of caustic guitars and larynx-shredding vocals which is "Touch Me I'm Sick". The first three rows go predictably ape crazy. Well aware that such an opener is rather like serving the icing on the cake first, Arm deadpans, "thanks - you can all go home now."

As if. There's plenty more peerless blending of punk's energy with the steam-roller drive of heavy metal and garage rock's grubby effects (superfuzz and big muff are the names of distortion boxes, remember) where that came from. "You Got It (Keep It Outta My Face)" still boasts the second best intro in the history of grunge, Sonic Youth's "Halloween" is spat out with awesome malevolent ferocity and the monstrous "In 'N' Out Of Grace" rears up to deliver a thrillingly heavy blow to our heads with almost no effort at all. Twelve tunes in an amped-up history recap. One killer band. Still.

by Sharon O'Connell